COVID19: One death, serious cases fall slightly

Cyprus reported one coronavirus death on Saturday, as new daily cases and hospitalisations continued to fall to 401 and 244, respectively.

The Health Ministry said in its Covid bulletin that a 74-year-old woman who died at Nicosia General was the latest victim of the virus, raising the August death toll to 32 and 456 since the pandemic started.

The mean average age of those who died from COVID-19 is 77.

It said that hospitalisations were down 11 from Friday’s 255, of whom 87 are critical, five less than the day before.

Of these, 47 remain intubated, five less from the previous day, and 81.97% of patients are unvaccinated.

The PCR and antigen rapid testing increased by 323 to 54,496, which, based on the 401 new infections, generated a benchmark ‘test positivity’ rate of 0.74%, slightly down from Friday’s 0.77% and below the high-risk threshold of 1.00%.

This raised the total number of all SARS-CoV-2 infections during the past 17 months to 108,707.

Of the new cases, 10 passengers tested positive in PCR tests at Larnaca and Paphos airports, 53 from contact tracing and 104 were diagnosed from private initiative and hospital tests.

A further 151 new cases were identified from private rapid tests.

Another 83 were from the free national testing programme, available only to those vaccinated or recovered from earlier infection.

Of these, 28 were in Nicosia, 21 in Limassol, 15 in Larnaca, 11 in Paphos and 6 in the Famagusta district.